[Reader-list] Sarai / Independent Fellow 2007/ Burton Cleetus/First Posting

[burton cleetus]

    Dear Friends, I am Burton Cleetus, research scholar at the Center for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi, working on the topic “Indigenous Traditions and Practices in Medicine and the impact of Colonialism in Kerala”. My thesis is an attempt to figure out as to how esoteric and localized healing techniques were refashioned, revitalized and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda, through various forms of exclusion and integration. 
   
  Here I would like to address the arrival of Rockefeller Foundation of the United States, in the formulation of a health care policy for Travancore.
   
  Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity:
  The Rockefeller Foundation in Travancore
   
  This is to provide a synoptic presentation of the proposal as well as to draw upon the historical factors on which a sanitary policy was formulated in Travancore with the support of the Rockefeller foundation of the United States in 1929.
   
  The erstwhile state of Travancore, which later became part of Kerala, was termed as ‘progressive’ for the high human development indices of its subject population, recorded through the official periodical statistics. The term “progressive” had a definite meaning in the lexicon of colonial modernity. It signified the rates at which indigenous societies and groups responded to the ideological apparatuses of western science, and thereby re-formulated its contemporary cultural practices on the basis of the instrumentalist rationalist of the west.
   
  The transformation of the Travancore state from a largely pre-modern principality to a modern one was accompanied by the ‘reorganization’ of its branches of administration at various historical junctures.  The disbandling of the private forces of the Nayar chieftains and the subsequent raising of a professional army under the guidance of a Belgium officer in the late eighteen hundreds, to the formulation and implementation of a health care policy, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States in 1929 is a long history. 
   
  In its nineteenth century political agenda, while an organized bureaucracy and the police became visual manifestations of state power, public instruction functioned as a pedagogical act in the means towards generating ideological consent for governance. However the state from early nineteenth century, to mention, was concerned about providing western forms of medical care to the people, as a superior form of therapeutic practice. And hence, in turn, established government dispensaries under state patronage, or aided the Christian missionaries in their medical mission. However as a state policy, it overlooked the importance of health care as an important medium of exercising hegemony and control over the population, which it had to exercise control. This was because medicine as an ideology, unlike education, remained on the fringes of the dominant societal discourses under modernity. 
   
  The fact that the restructuring of the department of health care took place almost one hundred and fifty years after the initiation of the state to western epistemic paradigms, points out that various frames of state power, under modernity, emerged and took shape over a long spell of time. Thus public health as a sphere of governance remained the most neglected arena of reform. It was by the early decades of the twentieth century that the state realized that, though not closely linked to governance, indirectly it constituted an important constituent of state power. 
   
  This lethargy towards framing a coherent health care policy for the state under went rapid change by the early decades of the twentieth century. The establishment of the regional press, the movement of population towards the urban centres, and the emergence of a social elite mainly in the urban sites, materialised a new form of discourse between the political authority and the social elites in Travancore. The press informed the public on the arrival and the prevalence of the new diseases, like dysentery, cholera, plague, malaria, elephantiasis, etc. Thus diseases came to be perceived mainly as a result of unhygienic conditions, infected through water, air, or originated from the breeding of mosquitoes or spread rats etc. 
   
  Thus the fear of the outburst and the spread of contagious diseases, rather than its actual spread, raised deep concern among the urban population. More than ever it was the fear of the lack of knowledge of the contagious diseases and the failure to conceptualize them generated the social crisis. The state thus had to assure the urban population that micro-level interventions in the human body through the aid of western clinical equipments and medicines would redeem the society and the individual from its ailments.
   
  This was because the government realized that under the new socio-economic and political conditions the urban populace became the main stay of the generation of political sovereignty for the state of Travancore. A transformation in the nature of societal bond between the social elites was manifested when the government closed down the ootupura (free feeding houses) for the Brahmins and in its place opened up dispensaries for the inhabitants of the cities. 
   
  The engagement of the Rockefeller foundation in Travancore is attempted on this socio-political backdrop. Thus medicine more than as a method of cure functioned as an ideological tool; both as an assurance from the state to the emerging social elites in the urban centres, as well as provided an opportunity for the political authority to re-inscribe its commitment to its subject population as being a progressive one; the hall mark of state power under modernity.
   
   Comments for the paper are cordially invited and appreciated.
   
   
   
   
   

 		
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